10 Online Marketing Tips by the Best Online Marketing Gurus

Influencers are a great source of inspiration and because their contribution to online marketing is so important, I decided to ask them one simple question: ‘If you had only one online marketing tip to give, what would it be?’ Here are their answers to help you focus on what matters…

Define your editorial mission statement (what we call, a content marketing mission statement). Every great media company starts with an editorial mission, but hardly any brands do. The editorial mission helps you define your audience, your point of view, and what you are striving to do with your content. Here’s a full article on this for more detail.

Have a plan and a strategy. Answer the “why” and the “what” questions: Why are you creating content? What do you hope your content will accomplish? Then set your plan and program from there. Also, have fun with it. Content is a tremendous opportunity — so create and publish things that are useful to your audience (have clear empathy for the problems they have), but also full of inspiration and are enjoyable. My formula for that is here.

The most important tip would be to regularly offer new information that is helpful and useful to your clients and potential clients. Keep the focus on your readers and always strive to engage and educate (and sometimes entertain). Other aspects of content marketing like social media and SEO and so on can be learned and incorporated over time. But it’s the value and consistency which is critical.

Become extremely good at outreach. If you want to do well in SEM you need to be able to get Links, Likes & Traffic. Everyone knows you need great content to “attract” those links and likes. However, what you do not hear much about is outreach. It simply is not enough to create something cool, post it on your social media channels and wait for good stuff to happen. If you can really shine at outreach you will always have a job and clients. It is one of the hardest things to master but will never go out of style.
The biggest piece of advice I can give in outreach is to put yourself in their shoes. Be short and to the point because you value their time. Be extremely relevant. If you are wondering if this piece is right for them…it’s not. Know it’s right for them or do not reach out. Content may be king but without outreach it will be a short reign.

Our #1 tip is make sure that you have a good understanding of all the basic elements of SEO Success Factors, more specifically, how on-the-page and off-the-page factors work together. You don’t have to become an expert in every possible area, but it’s helpful to have baseline knowledge in order to decipher between good and bad SEO tactics – especially when reading information online or when considering vendor services, products or tools to aid in your search marketing efforts. Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors is a good reference ‘bible’ of sorts:

Stop focusing on vanity metrics. Too many companies try to focus on improving things like their pageview count or their bounce rate when it doesn’t affect their revenue. Companies should focus on metrics that matter. For example, SaaS companies should look at LTV, churn and signups. E-commerce companies should focus on sales, average order value, and conversion rates. Publishing sites should focus on pageviews and ad revenue. The metrics you need to track will vary, you just have to look at what’s important for your business.

I find that many times, people have expectations that are too high. In paid advertising, you can have a campaign, raise awareness and maybe even have a sales bump when the ads are going. But on the social web, patience is required because the ultimate aim is connection and relationships. This takes time and persistence but the reward can be new customers and loyalty — something quite important to shoot for in our information-dense, competitive world!

My main tip would be to identify the key influencers in your industry and focus on adding value and building relationships with those influencers. Until you build your own audience you need to leverage off other audiences and the best way of doing this is through relationships with key influencers in your industry.

Connect with the best marketing content — and other great marketers at inbound.org. I’m biased, but I think it’s a cool, very helpful resource. And, it’s free. To do inbound marketing well, just create the content you wish had existed when you first began in your industry.

Thank you for this great interview roundup of some of the big names in the marketing vertical at Twitter and other social networks. The answers do seem a bit general but they do provide great areas for further investigation. Also, it would truly help a lot if you have each of your contacts’ twitter and Google+ link under their names for easier social outreach. Overall, great piece. Much appreciated.

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